Comment by joshstrange

AI did not kill tech interviews and anyone saying so is probably not interviewing correctly or trying to outsource the work to one of these other companies.

I’ve run interviews in the last year where I told people they were free to use LLMs in the initial coding (which we don’t watch in realtime) but when they are explaining the code to us we ask them to make a change (a tiny additional feature, 2-6 lines of code depending on how they originally solved it). The people who can’t are immediately disqualified (in our heads, obviously we were cordial in the meeting). Just to note, we let them use LLMs for the change too, it doesn’t help the people who are completely relying on the LLM.

You can use LLMs all you want IF, and only if, you understand what it’s outputting and can build on top of that and/or modify the code it wrote.

As for the deepfake video stuff, ehh, I don’t know as I’ve never seen it “in person” (only videos of how it could look) so I’m not sure if I would notice it or not. We have multiple interviews and I’m confident that speed of answers would give away someone using AI or they would say something stupid the AI hallucinated. That confidence comes from talking to LLMs extensively. They can BS for a little bit but then it becomes clear they full of it.

Also LLMs aren’t going to answer questions like “tell me about a project you worked on at a previous company” or “describe a time where you had to fix production issue and how you went about it”. I had many people trip up here and be unable to describe a past project with any level of detail.

Bottom line, I ask a lot of questions a LLM cannot answer well (not on purpose, these questions were written prior to thinking about LLMs/AI and I ask for people to make a minor edit to code “they” just wrote.

Lastly, the interview process is only the first step. What are these people doing after they get hired? Are they continuing to pay for AI tools to help them lie about who they are? it sure seems like their skill, or rather lack thereof, will become readily apparent even if somehow they made it past the interview process (which again I don’t understand unless you have a bad interview process).